How to Choose Sites to Target
The inclusion of Penguin into Google’s core algorithm allowed websites to fix broken and disqualified links with real-time results. “Link juice”, or the evaluation of what value a link can pass, is primarily determined by the domain authority (DA) of the page possessing the inbound link, as well as the relevance, anchor text, and overall quality of the link, as search engines are getting better and better at determining spam. With strong technical on-page metrics and some stellar content, backlinks could bridge the divide between increased brand exposure and increasing your conversion rate.
Linking strategies intimidate prospective businesses because it involves relying on third-parties, such as blogs or other websites, to evaluate your content and to promote your brand. Isn’t that why we go through the trouble of SEO to gain trust with search engines in the first place?
Paired with Google’s RankBrain, link equity is the most important factor in helping your content rank organically and websites can’t thrive without them. The hardest part of backlinking is actually placing those links on other websites and which ones to choose from. A growing debate has been growing within the SEO world over the importance of link authority and if it trumps link relevance.
Authority vs. Relevance
Essentially, the goal of a backlink is to increases your link equity, which helps to promote your individual webpage organically, also improving its page authority (PA). It should also increase the referral traffic to the page it is linking to, which should drive leads and conversions. Backlinks should be mainly focused on websites that specialize or are in some way related to your niche.
Too often, many business plans focus on simply acquiring high-level domain links and generally ignoring domains with low DA scores. All links are not created equal, but with all other metrics being equal, there is a reason you should seek niche relevance over a high-level domain with very little relevance.
Placing Relevant Links
The argument for choosing a relevant link over an authoritative link could simply lie in the fact that you want your links to be clicked on. If choosing between an irrelevant domain with a high DA and low-authority niche domain, consider that both websites may drive the same amount of referral traffic, but the more relevant domain could drive more targeted customers. These are the customers who are more likely to make conversions and engage directly with your brand.
Despite how important that first reason is, the SEO oriented reason falls into the idea of thematic consistency, or creating a fully fleshed out strategy of different signals all pointing to the same end. Search engines are always getting smarter, so it’s reasonable that if you want your content to be pointing to certain ideas and keywords, your links should also do the same.
Businesses should consult the potential websites’ keyword usage in relation to your link. Relevant link placement places a greater chance to produce relevant, keyword specific anchor text, which will substantiate your theme. Chances are these are the keywords you are already competing for and will give your webpage an edge to rank organically, even if it’s semantically similar and not an exact-match keyword.
Businesses should not discount authoritative websites for their backlink portfolio. Small niche-based websites also possess the potential to scale greater and build authority over time. This effect could increase the amount of referral traffic gathered from that website in the future. Finally, as a small niche-based website scales greater it could also help promote your brand and look to your website as a source for future content and topics.
How Important is Authority?
Domain authority is still used as a standard estimate of a website’s value, but in reality, it is fairly subjective and Google doesn’t have a true authority metric. Most DA checkers use Moz metrics, which are fairly reliable, but not without flaw. Even authority software can be flawed and run counter to empirical data. Irrelevant links on a high-level domain may not only discount the link, but can also harm the reputation of the domain itself. This tactic could be considered phishing and hurt your reputation based marketing strategy.
Small businesses and startups should seek authoritative sites to gather links from. While saying that Google doesn’t evaluate authority may or may not be true, it strongly values domain trust. Typically, the first two positions in an organic search listing will be authoritative domains, even if they don’t possess the highest quality content. One theory of why high domain authority links are better is because they are crawled quicker, rather than that they actually pass on any significant value.
The DA score of the website you are gathering backlinks from can play a part in determining the trust of your website, as well as the quality of your content in a tangential way. If you’re being sourced by the Wall Street Journal, which has an amazing DA, your quality will be evaluate as very high. There are a number of free tools available to look up another domain’s DA score.
Authoritative links also improve your own DA, as well as your page authority (PA). A higher DA will translate to higher rankings, greater exposure, and thus more conversions. A backlink from a high ranking website will also give your website greater exposure from that website’s visitors and increase your referral traffic. If your link was used as a source on a high-level domain you could increase the amount of backlinks you get from root domains who will value your website as a trusted source, essentially remarketing your link without the effort.
Yet falling for authority metric blindness may cause you to lose sight of relevance. While authoritative links may increase your referral traffic, they could also increase your bounce rates, decrease your dwell time, and impact your conversion rate without bringing in enough of a targeted audience.
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